Best Android apps for doctors, physicians, and medical practitioners

When you’re a medical professional, lives are in your hands. Saving them means relying on split-second decisions and everything you ever learned from med school and real-life application. Though your medical texts may help you out in dire situations, you can’t always ask for five minutes to run to your office to page through a book.

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What you can do is to make things easier, not just for yourself but your staff and your patient by carrying medical texts and references in your pocket. The Google Play Store is brimming with all sorts of apps and even doctors get their own share of handy tools.

You won’t ever have to worry about being far away from that book you memorized from cover-to-cover when you can lean on an app sitting comfortably on your Android device. We’ve put together a list of some of the best apps to help out medical professionals, no matter what their field of expertise is.

Medscape is the leading medical resource for clinical use not just by physicians but also nurses, medical students, and other medical health professionals. Medscape gives you medical news from Medscape News. Get daily news from any of the 34 specialties; just select the specialties that you’d like to follow.

The app also gives you the ability to search the entire Medscape News and MEDLINE databases, as well as the ability to save articles and read them offline. Medical health professionals have access to prescribing and safety information for more than 8,000 branded and generic drugs, OTC drugs, and herbals and supplements.

Check almost any disease, condition and procedure by being able to access over 4,000 evidence-based articles authored by leading physicians and experts, 600 step-by-step procedure videos, and 100 tables and protocols.

There’s one thing to keep in mind when using Medscape, however; users with rooted devices and ad-blocker software may experience connectivity errors while using Medscape. Devices that are supported by Medscape are the Motorola Droid, the Motorola Droid X, Motorola Droid 2, HTC Incredible, Samsung Galaxy S, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

With WebMD on your Android device, you have 24/7 access to mobile-optimized health information and decision support tools to help you improve your decision making and health improvement efforts. You get access to tools such as WebMD’s Symptom Checker, Drugs & Treatments, First Aid Information, and Local Health Listings.

With the help of a 3D figure, doctors can determine what’s troubling a patient by tapping on the part of the body that the patient feels discomfort in. From there, they can narrow their search by selecting the patient’s symptoms and viewing a list of potential conditions and issues.

Doctors will also be able to access WebMD’s extensive database for information on Drugs, Supplements and Vitamins, as well as being able to access Uses, Side Effects and Warnings. That way, doctors can prep patients for any possible discomfort without having to guess.

WebMD can also make identifying the pills a patient is already taking with its Pill Identification Tool; you won’t have to press your patient for some pill’s name they hardly remember when you can easily identify prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines by its shape, color and imprint.

WebMD is chock-full of other features you can try out and it’s free to download from the Google Play Store.

No matter where you go, you can rest assured that you’ve got a reference to all international diseases in your pocket. You can be on your vacation or in transit when you encounter someone who needs your medical advice and you’ll always have the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) at your fingertips.

Diseases Codes ICD-10, an Android app developed by Trofo Systems, can help you determine disease codes through its objective and fast interface. Make queries by typing the disease name as well as by code. If you’re feeling lazy, or stumped, auto-complete search will make your life much easier.

The most-accessed codes can be saved in a bookmark list for easy access and reference. The best part is, you don’t need to be connected to the Internet to access data. All that information is stored in a single download of 1 MB and you can even install it on your SD card. You will, however, need Internet access for disease-related ads.

Epocrates makes sure that you have access to reliable drug, disease, and diagnostic information wherever you are. Epocrates offers a free drug application, Epocrates Rx, that features thousands of drug monographs, a drug-drug interaction checker to make sure that patients won’t get a cocktail of unfortunate side-effects, a pill identifier for when you need to tell medicine apart and label them correctly, and health plan formularies.

Medical health professionals can check out a drug of their choice, from its common term to its full name, as well as its uses and reported doses. Doctors can also check a number of infectious diseases and their empiric therapy, specific therapy, or other bits of information that may be helpful to the doctor.

If you need more features and functions, you can also purchase Epocrates’ premium applications, such as Epocrates Essentials Deluxe, Epocrates Essentials, and Epocrates Rx Pro. You can download Epocrates for free from the Google Play Store.

If you need more medical resources, Skyscape Medical Resources might just give you what you’re looking for. This app is a valuable decision-support tool that helps medical professionals–from doctors to nurses and med students–find the answers they need quickly.

Available for free on the Google Play Store, Skyscape Medical Resources comes packed with medical resources such as drug information, medical calculators, and clinical information on more than 850 topics.

You also get RxDrugs, comprehensive information on thousands of brands and generics with interactions, including a multi-drug analyzer tool, pill images and over 400 integrated dosing calculators.

Users also get Archimedes, a medical calculator with over 200 interactive tools, Outlines in Clinical Medicine for evidence-based clinical information on hundreds of diseases and symptom-related topics, and MedAlert for in-context and specialty focused journal summaries.

If you need more, you can purchase any of the 600 premium resources in 35 medical specialties and conveniently access them all through Skyscape Medical Resources.

If you’re writing a paper, or you’re compiling a number of journal citations for your own research, PubMed Mobile might just be the app for you. PubMed Mobile lets you search the PubMed database packed with 21 million citations for articles and journals, specifically biomedical and life science journals.

Search for what you need using the keyword search function, and save your search queries. Save citations for easy access later or share them with other doctors and medical health professionals by e-mailing them. If a full article is available, link to it.

The app also has functions like posting a comment for an article for public viewing, writing a note to yourself, and viewing public comments for an article. PubMed Mobile is available for free on the Google Play Store. If you want more features, such as the ability to search an author or a journal, you can purchase PubMed Mobile Pro for a small fee.

Developed by QxMD Medical Software, Inc. and a collaboration of clinical experts from diverse backgrounds, comes Calculate by QxMD. This app provides clinical calculators and decision support tools for health providers. It has detailed references with Pubmed integration and provides comprehensive and insightful results for both medical health professionals and patients.

Calculate is focused on highlighting tools which are useful in clinical practice and serve to impact diagnosis, treatment, or determining prognosis. With its elegant and intuitive user interface design, users can access more than 150 unique calculators and decision support tools.

Select from any of its numerous calculators, grouped together for easy access. Choose whatever fits your current needs, such as general calculators, those specifically for cardiology, and many more.

The app provides tools to reduce and predict perioperative, guide treatment, determine prognosis, dose, calculate, classify, manage, stage, understand and diagnose. Calculate by QxMD is available for free from the Google Play Store.

Sometimes patients won’t take the doctor’s word and will try to skirt around diet plans meant to help them get better. They might just need a push in the right direction with concrete numbers, together with your guidance. Helping your patients keep a good grasp on how much they’re consuming will be easier with Calorie Counter – MyFitnessPal.

Boasting the largest database of over 1,700,000 foods and an amazingly fast food and exercise entry, doctors can help their patients take those unhealthy pounds off.

Doctors can also recommend this app to their patients with Android devices, so they can easily keep track of all the major nutrients, calories, fat, protein, carbs, sugar, fiber, and cholesterol they’re consuming. The app can also give doctors an idea of what exercises to recommend their patients, with a selection of 350 exercises. Calorie Counter – MyFitnessPal can be downloaded for free from the Google Play Store.

Though obstetricians and gynecologists could best benefit from the Ob (Pregnancy) Wheel app, any medical health professional with pregnant patients can make use of this app. This multi-function pregnancy calculator lets you calculate dates of pregnancy down to the very last detail.

You can determine when your patient’s last menstrual period was, her estimated time of conception, weeks gestational age, estimated due date, and more.

If you have several pregnant patients and you don’t have time to spare keeping separate records for them, no problem. Ob (Pregnancy) Wheel lets you store multiple patients for easy retrieval.

If you need to view data on your computer, or you’d just like to back it up in a safe place, Ob (Pregnancy) Wheel can export data to XML on your SD card.

Ob (Pregnancy) Wheel’s pro version lets you import saved data and save the app to your SD card. Start calculating pregnancy details using Ob (Pregnancy) Wheel, available on the Google Play Store for free.

Keep your mind sharp and make sure you’ve got all the important parts of the body memorized with Speed Anatomy Quiz Free. The app is an addictive game that tests your speed and challenges your knowledge of human anatomy.

Don’t limit yourself to boring flashcards and covering body part names on a chart when you can have a more enjoyable time playing a game. Speed Anatomy Quiz Free contains almost 300 labeled parts from all the main regions of the body.

The faster and more precise you can point to a liver, a gallbladder or an incisor, the more points you earn. When you hold your finger over an image, a magnifying glass appears which allows you to achieve more precision and higher scores.

Speed Anatomy Quiz Free contains 28 levels, including an overview of bones, muscles, arteries, veins, the respiratory system and much more. Instead of dozing off during those late night shifts, work on your mastery of the human body with Speed Anatomy Quiz Free.

With these apps, doctors, physicians, medical practitioners, and other health care professionals can rely on medical texts located right in their pockets. Download one or all of these Android apps for doctors and make your clinical practice easier. If your favorite medical professional app didn’t make it to our list, let us know what it is in a comment below.